Posted on October 2, 2026
Authors, editors and agents say Jewish and Israeli authors are being stealthily shunned post–Oct. 7. Startups like High Line Publishing Studio are building an alternative.
By Pamela Paul
Sept. 10, 2026
Jews may be known as “the people of the book” for religious reasons, but the phrase also captures a strong literary tradition. Many notable editors and founding publishers of the past century have been Jewish. Books by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel have long been assigned in American schools. For decades, bestseller lists and prestigious literary awards have featured Jewish novelists from Philip Roth to Michael Chabon.
Yet today, many Jews believe that publishing is biased against them.
Jewish authors, agents, scouts, editors and other book professionals describe an ecosystem from big publishers to #BookTok that is suppressing Jewish and Israeli voices. Agents and scouts say it’s become impossible to sell foreign rights to works by Israeli writers. Established authors say their recent projects have been inexplicably turned down. Published writers with overtly Jewish books say their agents have dropped them from their roster; writers are being asked by editors to purge Jewish or Israeli elements from their books.
Multiple agents now post explicitly on their websites that they aren’t interested in “Zionist” submissions; one specified that neither “Nazis nor Zionist” writers need apply. One author shared an email from her former agent telling her to put her biography of a major Israeli figure on hold until “anti-Zionism” within publishing dies down.
London-based literary agent Neil Blair founded High Line Publishing Studio.
Now a handful of publishing startups focused on Jewish and Israeli writers are emerging in response. High Line Publishing Studio, founded by Neil Blair, a London-based literary agent best known for representing J.K. Rowling, launches today with the goal of publishing writers whose ideas and subject matter he believes have been shut out of mainstream publishing. Upcoming titles include U.K. editions of recent books by Dara Horn and Matti Friedman; and world rights to new books by Adam Louis-Klein, an influencer and founder of Movement Against Antizionism; and “Anatomy of a Failure: The Road to October 7th” by Amos Harel, a military correspondent for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which examines strategic errors on Israel’s part before and after Oct. 7.
“The lack of diversity in publishing in New York and London with respect to Israeli and Jewish voices started years ago and increased exponentially after October 7,” said Blair. “There’s a real need and desire to launch a new vehicle that is invested in voices across the whole spectrum.”
High Line joins Canary Publishing, a nonprofit publisher of Jewish, Israeli and Zionist writers, founded earlier this month by Howard Lovy, an independent editor based in Michigan. Meg Keene Books, a fiction imprint of Wicked Son press, launched in July. Its first title will be the American edition of Booker prizewinner Howard Jacobson’s “Howl,” a 2026 satirical novel about post-Oct. 7 diaspora Jews, which came out in the U.K. in March, but which had been unable to land a U.S. publisher.
Booker prizewinning novelist Howard Jacobson, whose book ‘Howl’ came out in the U.K. in March. BEN BIRCHALL/PA WIRE/ZUMA PRESS
Though some literary professionals expressed fears of ghettoization, many welcome these new entities as necessary to fight bias, foster new writers and serve readers of Jewish and Israeli books across borders.
“Why are we pretending that this is anything other than a racist and bigoted hate movement that many people in the publishing industry have swallowed?” said Horn, whose latest book, “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living,” was published in the U.S. by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, earlier this month.
“Any publisher who is not publishing Jewish books is making a financial mistake because this is a community that supports authors and buys books,” said Horn, whose book debuted at no. 6 on the New York Times bestseller list. “I feel bad for those who have because they’re shooting themselves in the foot.”
Boycotts and Cancellations
In August, an independent bookstore in Nashville canceled the launch event for Alyssa Rosenheck’s book, “White. Blonde. Jew.: A Call to End Extremism, Speak Up and Reclaim Center,” after a post promoting the event on Instagram drew public outcry. “Ain’t nobody coming to your Nazi book rally,” ran one typical comment to the post, since removed.
“It always starts with a pressure campaign, with institutions capitulating to online and offline pressure campaigns for platforming Zionist authors,” Rosenheck said. She said she pleaded with the store owner who publicly cited security concerns. On Instagram, the store owner, whose husband is Jewish, posted, “This was never about an author, her Jewish identity, or the subject of her book. It was never about censorship.”
SIMON & SCHUSTER; PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
“I told her this was a pattern of squeezing Jewish people out of public spaces,” said Rosenheck, who had hired private security for the canceled event. The bookstore owner declined to comment.
Authors of books with Jewish or Israeli characters say their titles are “review bombed” with 1-star on sites like Goodreads to depress interest. They say their books go unreviewed in outlets that previously covered their work and that bookstores, especially independents, refuse to stock or display their titles. Many described “a chill” in the literary world that is hard to pin down because it’s hard to prove a negative.
Everyone in publishing will tell you what people in Hollywood say about movies: Nobody knows what will work. It’s hard to determine, publishing professionals emphasize, why one might get turned down or why a new book slips by unnoticed, unreviewed or unpromoted.
Despite robust sales for breakout titles, publishing remains a challenging business. It’s also a risk-averse one, in which publishers worry about taking on any project that might face a boycott or predictable headwinds. As one editor explained, the opaqueness of these decisions allows for “plausible deniability” at any point in the chain—from publicists to indie bookstore employees—even as various parties might be deliberately subverting a book’s prospects. The five largest U.S. publishing houses, Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan declined to comment. HarperCollins Publishers, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.
“I can’t say there’s a ban on Jewish or Israeli books,” said Matti Friedman, an Israeli author whose most recent book, “Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe,” came out in the U.S. in March. “But I know for a fact that it’s very difficult to get Israel-related books published and that Israeli authors are often either ignored or expected to sign declarations of support for BDS and to use the word ‘genocide’ as the price of entry.” BDS refers to the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement targeting Israel.
In the case of American authors, several agents and editors said, it’s about being the right kind of Jew.
“Only the Dead Know Peace,” a thriller set in Israel and Palestine, came out in August 2023 to strong initial reviews. But after Oct. 7, its author, Alberto Mansur, said his publisher gave him “the cold shoulder.” He said he was told bookstores weren’t buying it and the publisher would no longer ship copies.
“I check most of the boxes for minority representation,” said Mansur, who is Jewish and Mexican-American. “I’m an immigrant from Latin America; my ancestry is Arabic. I don’t look white. But for many people, not just in the publishing industry, Jews are perceived as white people, with all the privilege that entails.” Mansur’s publisher said it maintained correspondence with Mansur throughout and didn’t restrict or withhold shipment of his book, adding that it wouldn’t be in its financial interest to do so.
In 2024, the Jewish Book Council, a nonprofit literary organization, opened a hotline for authors to report instances of antisemitism in the literary world; as of July, it has received 350 independently verified responses.
On July 9, the free-speech organization PEN America published “A Silent Moratorium,” a compendium of accounts from Israeli and Jewish writers who described “a widening cultural isolation since the attacks of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza.”
PEN America’s president, Dinaw Mengestu, resigned that same day. In an essay on LitHub, Mengestu explained his decision as a response to what he described as the organization’s inconsistent position on boycotts, particularly with regard to BDS. Mengestu later wrote on Instagram that its paper suggested that “writers are excluded because of their ethnicity rather than the quality of their work and [conflates] political beliefs with identity.”
PEN America said its longstanding policy on cultural and academic boycotts hasn’t changed, opposing boycotts institutionally while defending the rights of individuals to engage in them.
Antisemitism or Anti-Zionism, Neither or Both?
Jews remain sharply divided over whether anti-Zionism amounts to antisemitism; many believe the lines are blurred. According to a 2025 poll, 37% of American Jews identify as Zionist, 7% as anti-Zionist and 8% as non-Zionist; 48% identified with none of those labels. Still, 79% said they were deeply concerned about antisemitism.
In interviews, several Jewish authors and editors pushed back against the suggestion that publishing has become antisemitic.
“If people think saying that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza is antisemitic, then they are likely to falsely perceive a vast expansion of antisemitism,” said Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and author of “Israel: What Went Wrong?” published this spring. “Opposing the existence of the state as a political statement, whether it is made by Orthodox Jews, Palestinians or anyone else, is not antisemitic.”
If publishing were antisemitic, these critics ask, how do you explain the ongoing success of Jewish and Israeli novelists like Etgar Keret, Deborah Levy and David Grossman, and of nonfiction writers even when writing on explicitly Jewish topics?
Books by Jewish writers with sharply different political views have succeeded since Oct. 7. Peter Beinart’s “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza” and Molly Crabapple’s “Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund,” both by anti-Zionist authors, hit the bestseller list. But also, “Hostage,” a 2025 memoir by Eli Sharabi, an Israeli who was held by Hamas for 491 days, and “When We See You Again,” Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s memoir about the murder of her son by Hamas, were both bestsellers.
Ben Hyman, editorial director of Schocken Books, a Jewish imprint within Penguin Random House, acknowledged that there is “incredible power” in anti-Zionist narratives right now, but cited two forthcoming titles on his list, “Pretend you Believe” by Rabbi Noa Kushner and “Arab/Jew” by Maurice Chammah, a Syrian-Jewish author writing about Arab-Jewish identity in the diaspora, as examples of Jewish publishing’s diversity.
“I don’t really buy the idea that only anti-Zionist books are getting attention,” Hyman, who was appointed in 2024, said. “I’ve seen successful books on both sides of that divide.”
In 2024, more than 5,000 writers and literary professionals, some of them Jewish, signed a pledge not to work with Israeli publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications “that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.” That same year, a spreadsheet labeled, “Is your fav author a Zionist???” went viral on social media, singling out authors who participated in Israeli book festivals or included Zionist characters and those who, by contrast, had issued statements supportive of the pro-Palestinian movement.
Increasing numbers of authors, both Jewish and not, are declining to sell Hebrew rights to their books and refusing to join panels with authors they deem Zionist.
“Zionism is out of fashion in the publishing world and it’s not ever going to be in fashion again,” said Benjamin Moser, author of “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History,” publishing this month. Book publishing, he and others emphasized, is now an overwhelmingly progressive industry, and opposition to Zionism is a strong component of that.
Moser’s book appeared on multiple “most anticipated” lists for September, whereas books by Jewish authors like Dara Horn and Simon Sebag Montefiore, both high-profile writers with significant readerships, but who have not publicly denounced Zionism, did not. (Sebag Montefiore’s book, “The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East,” is the no. 1 bestseller in the U.K.)
A Ready Market
Adam Bellow, a veteran editor and the son of Saul Bellow, started Wicked Son, which publishes a range of nonfiction, back in 2021 in response to rising antisemitism and the decline of Jewish intellectual and literary culture. His aim, he said, is fourfold: “to rebuild the Jewish reading public, promote a positive image of Israel among American Jews, import more Israeli authors to the U.S. and foster a thriving global, secular Jewish culture.” The days when every Jewish home in the Midwest had a copy of “The Joys of Yiddish,” he said, are gone.
High Line, the largest and most high-profile of these new efforts, will initially consist of two imprints, Odessa Editions and Antidote Books. Blair said its funding comes mostly from foundations and trusts, but declined to name specific sources.
“It’s very important that we not create a hermetic ghetto,” said Jacky Klein, executive publisher of Odessa. “We are here chiefly to support Jewish voices, but I’d also like to publish non-Jewish voices including books by Israeli-Arab writers and others writing about Israel, Iran, the Middle East and Jewish subjects. I want to connect with all those communities.”
Antidote Books, led by Joel Simons, a former publisher at HarperCollins UK, will publish idea-driven nonfiction on a range of subjects, whether it’s technology, ethics, history, current affairs or ideas around power. Both imprints will be distributed by Hachette, a major publisher.
Novelist Lee Child, who is not Jewish but who has publicly opposed cultural boycotts of Israel, joined High Line’s advisory board. “The idea is to give access to writers that the commercial publishing industry is uneasy with,” he said.
High Line’s founders say they’re aware they are working against strong headwinds in publishing, but believe they are offering something the public is hungry for and a need that has been underserved by mainstream publishers. They plan to offer competitive advances and invest in marketing their authors, often working with established communities of Jewish readers.
“This is not a charity or a not-for-profit,” Blair said. “There’s a fantastic commercial opportunity here and we want to take advantage of that.”
Klein and others pointed to a longstanding history of Jews creating new institutions—law firms, universities or hospitals—in response to being shut out of existing ones. “I’m excited that we are one of several startups doing this,” she said. “On one level, it’s competition, but my view tends to be that together, we have a better chance of reasserting Jewish writers on the international stage.”
Pamela Paul is a writer at large for The Wall Street Journal. She was previously at the New York Times where she was most recently an opinion columnist. Prior to that, she served as the longtime editor of the New York Times Book Review, oversaw all books coverage at the Times and hosted the weekly Book Review podcast. Before joining the Times, she was a contributing writer to Time magazine and a correspondent for the Economist.
She is the author of ten books, including “100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet,” “How to Raise a Reader,” “My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues,” “By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life,” “Parenting, Inc.,” “Pornified” and “The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony.” She is also the author of three picture books for children, “Rectangle Time” and “It Simply Can’t Be Bedtime.” Her latest picture book, “The Path” will be published in August 2026.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/antisemitism-books-literary-publishing-world-high-line-78267985?mod=hp_listb_pos2